From: James Hannam [mailto:b...@bede.org.uk] Sent: 02 February 2011 13:17 To: 'fis@listas.unizar.es' Subject: The Background to Modern Science Dear FIS list members,My sincere thanks to Pedro for asking me to contribute to a discussion on the origins of modern science. The subject is vast and so the comments below are very much focused on my own areas and period of concern. I hope this is of some interest to list members.Best wishesJames The Background to Modern ScienceHowever much we might admire the achievements of the ancient Greeks or the celebrated civilizations of China and Islam, modern science as we understand it arose in Western Europe within a deeply Christian milieu. Historians have now rejected the idea that there has been an inevitable conflict between science and religion, preferring what John Hedley Brooke has dubbed a “complexity thesis” or what I call “creative tension”. But the larger question of why science flourished when and where it did remains unanswered. A recent attempt by Toby Huff was greeted, rather unfairly, by something approaching derision in the history of science community. Despite the excellence of their mathematics, the Greeks never produced an experimental science which was able to distinguish between hypotheses about nature. As a result, they relied too much on reason. This led to notorious mistakes, such as Aristotle’s belief that heavy objects fall faster than light ones and that a moving object must be moved by something else. In the Middle Ages, Greek philosophy was still studied, but there had been important changes in several key areas. Christian Metaphysics Medieval science took place against an entirely different metaphysical background from that in pagan Greece. For medieval Christian natural philosophers, such as William of Conches, the world was not a product of natural forces but was created by an intelligent and loving God. This gave them sanction to study nature, even though there were no practical advantages to doing so. Today science is justified, in large part, by the technological marvels, like computers and medical drugs, which it helps to develop. But this close relationship between science and technology is a product of the nineteenth century. Before that time, the concept of applied science hardly existed (at least excepting the esoteric disciplines of alchemy and astrology). The religious sanction of natural philosophy meant that there was a good reason for studying it. Together with mathematics and other subjects, it became a compulsory part of the curriculum at the new universities. Indeed, in order to study theology, a student required a thorough grounding in the lower sciences. The Christian doctrine of creation had other implications for the study of nature. Aristotelian science presupposed an eternal universe which was the product of logically necessary relationships. This meant that the laws of nature were necessarily the way that they are and so could be established through the exercise of pure reason. This view was deemed heretical by the Bishop of Paris in 1277 and Christians were required to believe that the Creator was free to do as he liked. Thus, he could make the world as he saw fit and not as Aristotle said he ought to have done. This freed natural philosophers to consider cases, such as vacuums, that Aristotle said were impossible. It also encouraged them to successfully challenge the most basic axioms of Greek science. In the early twentieth century, Pierre Duhem suggested that 1277 represented the birth of modern science because this was when the stranglehold of Aristotle was broken. Although this now seems an exaggeration, Edward Grant continues to emphasise the importance of the condemnations at Paris.VoluntarismIn the seventeenth century, Descartes explicitly stated that the doctrine of divine freedom, known as voluntarism, must lead to an empirical science. If God was free to create the universe as he liked, Descartes said, the only way to find out how he had done it was to go out and look. But experimental science needs more than careful observation (something at which the Greeks excelled). Nature must also be put to the question, in the sinister phrase of Sir Francis Bacon. This required that the holistic worldview be abandoned. Nature had to be expected to perform in the laboratory in the same way that she did in the wild. In fact, there is no particular reason to believe that the aberrant situation of the controlled experiment can yield results that are generally applicable. This conclusion could only be drawn after a good deal of trial and error.Technological AdvanceAlthough technology as applied science was practically unknown before the nineteenth century, medieval inventions helped to illuminate science and provide the apparatus necessary to do experiments. For example, the invention of spectacles in Italy in the late thirteenth century may have furnished clues as to how the eye works. But, more importantly, spectacle-makers provided the lenses that eventually gave birth to the telescope. The compass became an object of study for Peter the Pilgrim in his seminal treatment of magnetism. And the mechanical clock, first recorded in thirteenth-century England, immediately brought to mind the cosmos itself as the creation of a divine clockmaker. The UniversitiesThe universities represented an entirely new kind of institution that provided a safe haven for academy study. A university is a corporation with its own legal personality with which it faces the world. The members of the university run its internal affairs, but they act together against external challenges. This has proved an extremely robust model that allowed the medieval universities to play the Church off against the state so as to enjoy a relatively high degree of academic freedom. They also provided an institutional home for the sciences which was not dependent upon royal patronage or wealthy individuals for support. Thus the philosophers of the Middle Ages provided modern science with an explicable metaphysical background, a theological reason for study and a warrant for the experimental method. They also enjoyed a secure home at their universities and new equipment to focus their studies. Nowadays, science can justify itself through its success, but we must not lose sight of the fact that this success could not arise until an effective way of doing science had been developed. It might even be the case that abandoning its original axioms has left contemporary theoretical science rootless and no longer so good at dealing with fundamental questions. The current impasse over string theory might have been provoked by a return to pure rationalism divorced from empirical results. BibliographyDavid Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to AD 1450, Second Edition (Chicago, 2008)Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge, 1996)Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2001)John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1999)Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210 – 1685 (Oxford, 2008)Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, Second Edition (Cambridge, 2003) ------------------------------------------
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